“... sex lives is jaw-dropping. In 1956, he went to Holkham Hall in Norfolk for the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner. In her recent memoir, Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner describes her husband’s sexual proclivities, but also says that in those days girls of her class couldn’t possibly ...”

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... of his life. 21 April. Persisting with the Duff Cooper diaries, which, though they’re more than frank about his innumerable liaisons, are utterly silent on more interesting topics, the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper ...”

“... and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the unfurling, regal drapery behind him (from his collection of Malayan fabrics), to the ...”

“... the rapid juxtaposition of high and low, the flight of fancy and the thump to earth. Here is Lady Anne Pantry, the bishop’s wife, musing on Ashringford Cathedral:And the cathedral was very perfect indeed. How admirable, through the just sufficient drapery of the trees, were the great glazed windows that flashed like black diamonds in the sun. The ...”

“... have omitted much that is interesting and revealing, but the omission of Bishop’s letters to Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about her work, seems odd. These letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The ...”

“... the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had ...”

“... considerable comic pains to prevent it. Mistress Page wants the Frenchman to marry her daughter, Anne, and although her husband, George, would prefer the upper-class twit Slender as a son-in-law, and Caius has a second rival in the person of the broke but ultimately successful courtier Fenton, no one expresses any serious Francophobia or asks whether the ...”

“... constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny. That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average ...”

“... Bacon gave his own party at his studio, to celebrate Michael Wishart’s marriage to his friend Anne Dunn. The party went on for two days and was, John Richardson reports,slightly presided over by the nanny, the blind nanny, who would be in the rocking-chair at the back of the studio … My mother had a house around the corner so I used to come and go at ...”

“... and a ‘hyper-aestheticised imagination’. Rickword likes the political poems. So does Frank Jellinek, who said in 1934 that they were ‘more valuable than his presence [in Paris] could have been’. But these poems ought to pose more of a problem than they have for Rimbaud’s admirers on the left. ‘L’Orgie Parisienne’ casts the insurgent ...”

“... centre of the Republican party: Reagan had paved the way by domesticating militarism in his sunny Frank Capra vision of virtuous nationhood and manhood. What is remarkable is that this same ideology, tarted up with some identitarian cosmetics, would capture the Democratic Party as well. Under Clintonite rule, Democrats could get on board with imperial ...”

“... near Harefield where last autumn we shot an earlier scene of Dance to the Music of Time. A Queen Anne house with later additions, it is now forlorn and neglected and has the CV of many too-large country houses, ending either as a conference centre or an old people’s home. This has been a home but has since been used for umpteen films, relics of which are ...”

“... into my stomach like a sword-swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and god-like’?After Anne Stevenson’s, Janet Malcolm’s and Jacqueline Rose’s battles to get the archives opened, and the passing of the copyright to Frieda Hughes, Sylvia’s daughter, we now have the unabridged journals, the restored text of Ariel and these two new volumes of ...”

“... the views of the medical profession. It didn’t work. Tony Blair’s first health minister, Frank Dobson, read its funeral rites when Labour came to power seven years later. Yet at the turn of the millennium, Alan Milburn replaced Dobson and Labour introduced a new, more radical version of that market. It was Labour that introduced foundation ...”